


The Boscombe Valley Mystery:  Annotations from a Love Story and Queer Context

by materialofonebeing



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: M/M, gay annotations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 09:18:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11055975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/materialofonebeing/pseuds/materialofonebeing
Summary: The great annotated versions don't.  So let's do.





	The Boscombe Valley Mystery:  Annotations from a Love Story and Queer Context

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for your interest. Please feel free to contact me on tumblr with your inputs and suggestions.

. . .

_We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It was from Sherlock Holmes and ran in this way:  
“Have you a couple of days to spare?”_

Instead of "My wife and I were seated at breakfast," the phrase, "We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I," highlighted the default domestic scene is of Watson and Holmes.

The courteous phrasing of the telegram, for which Holmes paid by the word, likely set it apart from the "laconic messages" Watson remembered from the end of Holmes's career (CREE). For the subsequent cases which came before the hiatus, Watson recorded no more invitations from Holmes by telegram or note.

. . .

_"Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect."_

Holmes clearly coaxed Watson with the air and scenery as “neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction" to Holmes (RESI). Holmes's solitary, non-case-related excursions into nature were his walks in Cornwall, which pleased Watson while doctoring him (DEVI), and walks in Sussex, from which Holmes also may have noted the "great view" as an appeal to Watson (LION).

. . .

_“What do you say, dear?” said my wife, looking across at me. “Will you go?”_  
_“I really don't know what to say. I have a fairly long list at present.”_  
_“Oh, Anstruther would do your work for you. You have been looking a little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good, and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes' cases.”_

Dialogue between Dr. and Mrs. Watson appeared also in TWIS, after which no Mrs. Watson spoke from the page. Given Watson's eagerness to accompany Holmes on several other cases, Nekosmuse suggested Watson's initial reservation here was a courtesy to his wife (2007).

While in SCAN Holmes observed wedlock had helped Watson put on weight, here Mrs. Watson found the doctor a little pale and needing a change from work. That Watson later told Holmes he had "not seen a paper for some days" confirmed his busyness. Watson in his new practice may not have been getting the rest his health required; less than eight months before, Watson's leg still had throbbed when the weather changed (NOBL).

. . .

_Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap._

Holmes's pacing, along with the niceties in the telegram, his expression of gratitude, the delay in purchasing tickets, the reservation of one room, and the absence of Watson on the order to visit the prison all together portrayed Holmes did not know whether Watson would join him on the trip.

A train station was one of the urban public spaces in which Holmes occasionally would have observed men seeking assignations with other men (Cook, 2008). 

. . .

_“It is really very good of you to come, Watson,” said he. “It makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely."_

Holmes's greeting contrasted with his response to Watson's visit in SCAN: “His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me." Holmes's uncertainty and polite gratitude in BOSC suggested continued awkwardness in the friendship after Watson had moved from 221B. One might conclude SCAN, though impossible to date definitively, was the first case after Watson's marriage, and BOSC the second. After Holmes whisked Watson away again in TWIS and STOC, the two men settled into seeing one another continually during the summer.

Holmes called on Watson not as a medico or chronicler, but as "someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely." 

. . .

_We had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of papers which Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he suddenly rolled them all into a gigantic ball and tossed them up onto the rack._

Holmes's untidy papers were Watson's "great crux" when the men shared rooms (MUSG). The hint of amusement with the papers here may have shown Watson's nostalgia as the publication date for BOSC, October 1891, was less than six months after his friend's apparent death at the falls.

After Holmes had called on Watson urgently for assistance, Holmes proceeded to think quietly to himself, either ignoring Watson or contenting himself with Watson's presence for a time.

. . .

_“The men had known each other in the colonies, so that it was not unnatural that when they came to settle down they should do so as near each other as possible. Turner was apparently the richer man, so McCarthy became his tenant but still remained, it seems, upon terms of perfect equality, as they were frequently together.”_

The untrue appearance of the relationship between McCarthy and Turner resembled the friendship of Barker and Douglas from VALL in that the men moved from work together abroad in mines. 

. . .

_“You know me too well to think that I am boasting when I say that I shall either confirm or destroy his theory by means which he is quite incapable of employing, or even of understanding.”_

Holmes's egotism caused friction with Watson during the cases of STUD and SIGN, and here Holmes clarified he was not boasting. In contrast, when Holmes and Watson were more comfortable together in VALL, Holmes goaded Watson by joking he should send for a laurel wreath. 

. . .

_“To take the first example to hand, I very clearly perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the right-hand side, and yet I question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as that.”_  
_“How on earth—”_  
_“My dear fellow, I know you well. I know the military neatness which characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in an equal light and being satisfied with such a result.”_

Holmes later made another observation on a man's neatness in BLUE, about Henry Baker's hat: “[Some evil influence] may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him. […] This hat has not been brushed for weeks.  When I see you, my dear Watson, with a week’s accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose your wife’s affection.” Watson here was in a "positively slovenly" state, and his wife had allowed him to rush out that way. Holmes, rather, was the one who noticed and pointed out the scruff, and to Holmes such observation showed love and affection.

Holmes's remarks conveyed closeness also in his "I know you well" following his earlier "You know me too well," and in Holmes's remembrance, presumably, of seeing Watson shave in his bedroom at Baker Street. 

. . .

_Holmes laughed softly to himself and stretched himself out upon the cushioned seat._

Though he had paced on the platform, Holmes relaxed while underway. In other train journeys, Watson witnessed Holmes agitated (THOR) or distracted with dark thoughts (COPP). Holmes's demeanor here suggested he was not absorbed with the investigation and was in a good mood.

. . .

_“And now here is my pocket Petrarch and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the scene of action.”_

Stern proposed Holmes's book was a 1550 edition adorned with a heart-shaped illustration of Petrarch and Laura, the married object of the poet's impossible longing (Stern, 1989). Klinger cited H. B. Williams's connection of Holmes's reading about "perfect love, which can never be consummated" with his regard for Mrs. Godfrey Norton (2005). One may find connection to feelings for Watson less fanciful.

. . .

_It was nearly four o'clock when we at last, after passing through the beautiful Stroud Valley, and over the broad gleaming Severn, found ourselves at the pretty little country-town of Ross._

Watson enjoyed the scenery, as Holmes had anticipated. The first readers would have interpreted Watson's interest in the natural view as manly while Holmes's reading of lovesick poetry would have been one mark of his aestheticism (Barolsky, 1984; Beckson, 1992).

. . .

_With him we drove to the Hereford Arms where a room had already been engaged for us._

Holmes and Watson had one room in the following cases: here in BOSC, where someone else engaged the room; TWIS, shortly after this case when Holmes had not planned for Watson to join him; SPEC, while waiting for a signal; VALL, “the best that the little country inn could do;" and WIST, when Watson neglected to make or imply an excuse.

. . .

_“It is entirely a question of barometric pressure.”_  
_Lestrade looked startled. “I do not quite follow,” he said._  
_“How is the glass? Twenty-nine, I see. No wind, and not a cloud in the sky. I have a caseful of cigarettes here which need smoking, and the sofa is very much superior to the usual country hotel abomination. I do not think that it is probable that I shall use the carriage to-night.”_

Holmes had resolved to spend the evening with Watson, not investigating and not talking about the case. Green pointed out barometric pressure of 29 meant rain (2008). Holmes, then, was confident in reading the improving weather or willing to risk its change. Holmes's lack of eagerness to visit to crime scene startled Lestrade. 

. . .

_“And your father?” asked Holmes. “Was he in favour of such a union?”_  
_“No, he was averse to it also. No one but Mr. McCarthy was in favour of it.” A quick blush passed over her fresh young face as Holmes shot one of his keen, questioning glances at her._

Holmes intuited and understood the softer passions which were "excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions" (SCAN).

. . .

_“Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have still time to take a train to Hereford and see him to-night?”_  
_“Ample.”_  
_“Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very slow, but I shall only be away a couple of hours.”_

Holmes again treated Watson politely. Throughout, Holmes refrained from teasing and irritable behavior towards his companion.

. . .

_I walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through the streets of the little town, finally returning to the hotel, where I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the action to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day._

Watson's reading selections, like Conan Doyle's, were not "Puritanical" (Lellenberg, Stashower,  & Foley, 2007). More interesting to Watson than a thinly-plotted, sensational story, though, were the events of his masculine escape (Humble, 2011). The case-related "events of the day" which Watson had experienced consisted only of Holmes's description and conversations with Lestrade and Miss Turner. Other events of the day were more Holmes-related. Watson's frustration recalled his throwing his notes into the fire while trying in SCAN to figure out what Holmes was "driving at."

. . .

_What a tissue of mysteries and improbabilities the whole thing was! I did not wonder at Lestrade's opinion, and yet I had so much faith in Sherlock Holmes' insight that I could not lose hope as long as every fresh fact seemed to strengthen his conviction of young McCarthy's innocence._

Watson's faith and hope in Holmes was touching. The men had known one another for more than seven years at this point.

. . .

_“The glass still keeps very high,” he remarked as he sat down. “It is of importance that it should not rain before we are able to go over the ground. On the other hand, a man should be at his very best and keenest for such nice work as that, and I did not wish to do it when fagged by a long journey.”_

Holmes, backtracking, offered a reason for his earlier intention to delay his work and stay with Watson. Though Holmes preferred to remain in London (RESI) and a journey could have tired him, Holmes tended to draw on impressive stores of energy for his cases. His consideration of Watson in this situation was more likely.

The word "fag" by this time did have another, different meaning about Uranian behavior, such as "fagging" in public schools, the preying of older on younger boys (Beckson, 1992).

. . .

_“He is not a very quick-witted youth, though comely to look at and, I should think, sound at heart.”_  
_“I cannot admire his taste,” I remarked, “if it is indeed a fact that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as this Miss Turner.”_

Watson uncharacteristically recorded that Holmes brought up the comely appearance of a man, Mr. James McCarthy. Watson characteristically brought up the charm of a woman.

. . .

_“Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly, insanely, in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry her at a registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible.”_

Holmes paraphrased "thereby hangs a tale" from romantic plays of Shakespeare (Green, 2008). One might speculate Holmes and/or Watson saw a parallel with Watson, "madly, insanely, in love" while married to someone else. "Idiot" was a harsh term from Holmes, one Watson recorded elsewhere only twice when Holmes was disappointed about missing a critical fact (HOUN  & STOC). 

. . .

_“And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow.”_

If Watson admired Meredith as much as Conan Doyle, Holmes may have brought up the author to please his friend (Lellenberg, Stashower,  & Foley, 2007). Holmes perhaps deduced what became clear after the publishing of SIGN later in the year, that Watson found Holmes at his most brilliant not during his work, but when Holmes chose to make conversation over dinner. Alternatively, if Holmes still was thinking of angst-ridden poetry, he may have remembered Meredith's 50-sonnet series on rejection (Vendler, 2013).

. . .

_“I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.”  
“You are right,” said Holmes demurely; “you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.”_

Lestrade frequently had visited Holmes on business (STUD) and, after Holmes's return, he saw both Holmes and Watson socially at 221B (SIXN). Though Holmes antagonized him in this and other cases, Lestrade was one of the small inner circle on whom Holmes and Watson would have relied to not raise an eyebrow at their partnership.

Lestrade here shielded Holmes from the local constabulary, or the local constabulary from Holmes.

. . .

_Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply._

Watson described Holmes's body and intensity much more explicitly than how Poe likened Dupin to a "bloodhound in pursuit of his prey" (Green, 2008). Holmes's animalistic arousal by his work contrasted starkly with the image of Holmes as the cold reasoner and calculating machine. After this experience of a "transformed" Holmes, Watson still highlighted the latter qualities in SIGN while Holmes lived. The pitch of Watson's observations might have reflected, again, the unmooring of their relationship from their habituated domesticity at 221B.

Readers could find this Watson's most sexually-charged description of Holmes. If one places the passage in a category of "naive" confessions of the period, its inclusion may have shown the distinction of homosexual from acceptable desires was not yet so complete as to cause Watson to censor himself (Sedgwick, 1985; Humble, 2011). Alternatively, both Watson, who considered himself worldly (SIGN), and Conan Doyle, mischievous, may have been quite aware of the suggestions this description would have to some readers. Shortly afterwards, Conan Doyle used bits of the same wording in _The Refugees_ without the passionate overtone. 

. . .

_“Nous verrons,” answered Holmes calmly. “You work your own method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon, and shall probably return to London by the evening train.”_  
_“And leave your case unfinished?”_  
_“No, finished.”_

Holmes again surprised Lestrade by lack of interest in investigating. Rather than contemplating his next actions at the crime scene, Holmes left with Watson for the hotel. 

. . .

_Holmes was silent and buried in thought with a pained expression upon his face, as one who finds himself in a perplexing position._  
_"Look here, Watson,” he said when the cloth was cleared “just sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don't know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a cigar and let me expound.”_

Watson's contribution was companionship, a similarity with STOC later in the month. Long after Holmes's retirement, Watson reflected modestly, "He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me—many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead—but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject" (CREE).

. . .

_“He put his hand over part of the map. “What do you read?”_  
_“ARAT,” I read._  
_“And now?” He raised his hand._  
_“BALLARAT.”_

There were other "arats" in Australia, but the key was Ballarat, a mining town Watson had mentioned to Holmes ten or eleven months earlier and to which Watson may have travelled (Klinger, 2005; Radford, 2005)

. . .

_“Well, it is not for me to judge you,” said Holmes as the old man signed the statement which had been drawn out. “I pray that we may never be exposed to such a temptation.”_  
_“I pray not, sir. And what do you intend to do?”_  
_“In view of your health, nothing. You are yourself aware that you will soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes.”_

Holmes referred to divine judgment and later to "the grace of God," though whether these words represented his worldview was unclear. About Holmes's religion, Watson presented that Holmes rejected the notion that chance ruled the universe (CARD) and desired "compensation hereafter" for the wronged (VEIL; Rosenberger, 1948). On the other hand, both Holmes's rationalist and aesthetic sides would have connoted opposition to orthodoxy. Holmes's morality derived from his conscience rather than compliance with religious dicta, laws, or, to a great degree, social conventions. Should Holmes's mature life have included unlawful indecencies of the time, one might rule out interference of these acts with his principles.

. . .

_“God help us!” said Holmes after a long silence. “Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.’”_

Turner's past banditry did not put off Holmes. Holmes instead sympathized with Turner as a victim of blackmail. Harris and Piercy, among others, inferred threat of blackmail related to Holmes's homosexuality motivated his particular concern about the crime (1982; 2007). 

. . .

References

Barolsky, P. (1984). The case of the domesticated aesthete. Retrieved from http://www.vqronline.org/essay/case-domesticated-aesthete

Beckson, K. (1992). London in the 1890s: A cultural history. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Cook, M. (2008). London and the culture of homosexuality: 1885-1914. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Green, R. L. (Ed.). (2008). The adventures of Sherlock Holmes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Harris, B. (1982, March). Did Sherlock Holmes kill Charles Augustus Milverton? The Baker Street Journal, 32(1), 45-47. 

Humble, N. (2011). From Holmes to the drones: Fantasies of men without women in the masculine middlebrow. In Macdonald, K. (Ed.), The masculine middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr Miniver read (90-103). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Klinger, L. S. (Ed.). (2005). The new annotated Sherlock Holmes (Vol 1). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lellenberg, J., Stashower, D., & Foley, C. (Eds.). (2007). Arthur Conan Doyle: A life in letters. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

Nekosmuse (2007). Decoding the sub-text: Being an examination of the homoerotic subtext contained within the Sherlock Holmes canon. Retrieved from http://www.nekosmuse.com/sherlockholmes/decodingthesubtext.pdf

Piercy, R. (2007). My dearest Holmes. Booksurge.com.

Radford, J. (2005). Dr. Watson to 1878. Retrieved from http://www.bakerstreetjournal.com/images/Radford_Watson_to_1878_JF.pdf

Rosenberger, E. S. (1948). The religious Sherlock Holmes. The Baker Street Journal, 3(2), 138-147. 

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York, NY: Colombia University Press.

Stern, M. B. (1989). Sherlock Holmes, rare book collector: A study in book detection. In Shreffler, P. A. (Ed.), Sherlock Holmes by gas-lamp: Highlights from the first four decades of The Baker Street Journal (110-129). New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Vendler, H. (2013, April 21). A masterpiece of Victorian adultery. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/112857/victorian-adultery-george-meredith-shocking-1862-sonnets


End file.
